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02.26.12 - 22:03

Probably not the one a handful of you were hoping for, but a game nonetheless. My son is 3, and likes the memory match card games, and I wanted to learn a little more about classes in Prototype, so I built one for him. It’s pure Prototype, with a handful of movement effects in Scriptaculous, with no server interaction or PHP at all. So it was kind of a fun little exercise, trying to come up with ways to do things in Javascript that I just take for granted in PHP.

It’s got a bunch of his favorite TV/movie characters in there as possible games/decks, as well as upper- and lowercase letters, and a hybrid where you can match the uppercase to the lowercase. He’s already got his uppercase alphabet pretty much down, but he needs a little work with lowercase. I think I plan to add a few more decks in there as well, probably a numbers one and a colors one (he doesn’t really need much with those, but my daughter will here in the next year or so). And probably an alphabet to animal deck as well, or alphabet to object, something like that.

Anyway, if you’ve got preschool-age kids, and you let them on your computer, you could do worse than let them play my game for a few minutes.

One quick tip: for some reason, Chrome doesn’t currently like the sound effects (more Scriptaculous). So if you get a blue screen right after flipping a card, reload the page and disable sound with the button in the corner. Weird, I know. Check back, occasionally, though. While I was working on this the sound worked fine, then Chrome updated and it didn’t work anymore. So it’s probably a version-specific thing, I would imagine it’ll get fixed in the next update. And I think your kids will enjoy it more if it goes “Tada!” when they win.